The conservative punditry has been going after Obama pretty hard lately for not visiting Iraq since the surge began. “How can he know what’s really happening?” they ask. McCain has been leading the chorus, as yet another way of implying that Obama is so young and inexperienced that he doesn’t know up from [...]

The public doesn’t have a right to know anything about private citizens. Anyone who says differently is selling something (probably a newspaper).

Humility. Temperance. Stewardship. Modesty. These are all good Christian values. They are good conservative values as well. Jesus taught them (as have most of the world’s great religious leaders of all faiths). In most cases, our parents and grandparents taught them as well. Christians, and I think [...]

For the first time this weekend, I saw McCain criticize Obama for having never served in the military. It’s an old criticism of potential presidential candidates, and so that didn’t surprise me. But it got me thinking: Barack Obama is the first presidential candidate we’ve had who came of age post-Vietnam, which means [...]

I’ve been looking up some demographic data today, and ran across the Pew Forum survey. In particular, they have detailed information on the religious breakdown of the country, as a whole and broken down by states. I found some of this pretty surprising. For instance:

An absolutely awful Op-Ed appeared in the New York Times today. The authors of the piece argue that Obama’s desire to conduct high-level diplomatic meetings with America’s enemies is a bad idea, and to make the point they look at Kennedy’s summit with Khrushchev in June 1961. According to the author’s, Khrushchev bullied [...]

I had the misfortune of listening to a Clinton speech today. Now, I’ve never been a big fan of Clinton. I’ve thought her to be too hawkish on foreign policy for my taste. I don’t like her plan for health care. And I found her comments on the gas tax holiday [...]

I haven’t ever thought of this before, but it kind of makes sense: a federal appeals court just ruled that it is discriminatory against the blind for the United States government to produce paper currency that is completely indistinguishable for those with poor or no eyesight. Admittedly, this is a small problem in the [...]

According to this article from Yahoo News, congress has passed a bill to have the justice department sue OPEC for violation of anti-trust law. American anti-trust law. OPEC being the Organization of Petroleum Exporting COUNTRIES. So… why exactly would we expect Iraq and Venezuela to follow US laws? And say we [...]

All evil can be separated into one of two categories: goals and tactics. An evil goal might be excessive power, excessive wealth, etc. An evil tactic might be violence, torture, etc. (Some would argue that the morality of the tactic is in large part defined by the goal–hence the phrase “the ends [...]